Jon Jones was a freshman at a junior college in Fort Dodge, Iowa, when some of the guys on the wrestling team decided to do what freshmen do and get tattoos. Jones settled on Chinese characters representing the initials of his sister, Carmen, who died of cancer when he was 12.

“I did no research on it,” Jones says. “I found out it didn’t say, ‘CJ.’ ”

What exactly did it say?

“I had no idea,” he says.

It was tough to tell which infuriated his mother more — that her son got a tattoo against her wishes, or that he now had Chinese characters of unknown meaning inked on the left side of his rib cage. So when he arrived home for the summer, she loaded him in the car and drove to the local Chinese restaurant in Endicott, N.Y.

The waitress looked at the characters etched on Jones’ rib cage and offered a translation:

Peaceful warrior.

How appropriate. How prophetic.

“Bones” Jones is a Mixed Martial Arts fighter now, a good one, maybe even a great one, maybe even the next big thing in the sport. He is pitted against 39-year-old light heavyweight Vladimir “The Janitor” Matyushenko in the main event when the Ultimate Fighting Championship comes to the San Diego Sports Arena on Sunday starting at 3 p.m. and going live on Versus at 6.

“Definitely he’s a new generation kind of fighter,” said Matyushenko, who is giving away 16 years, 10 inches of reach and 4 inches of height. “He’s tall, he’s lanky and at the same time he’s fast. There are some tall guys, but they’re kind of slow. … He’s a unique person.”

Unique, too, because of who he is in a full-contact sport contested in an octagonal cage with undertones of raw violence.

Jones is the son of a Pentecostal pastor in a small town in New York (where MMA competitions are still banned). He’s a family man at age 23, living with his girlfriend, their two daughters and a fluffy dog that is part golden retriever, part poodle. He never got in fights growing up. He was in the jazz choir in high school. He admits being a “pretty sensitive guy” and being “mean to absolutely no one” and that “trash talk gets to me, big time, you know?”

He lives near Buttermilk Falls. It’s just outside Ithaca, a quaint, wooded town that is home to Cornell University of the Ivy League.

“I was finding myself distracted, I was getting invited to every party,” Jones says. “So I moved about an hour away (to Ithaca), where I had no fans or family. No one knows who I am. I can just be a normal guy.”